Following on from my Florida comment in the last post, a friend of mine, some 20 years ago, used to rent a decent apartment in Spain for several months in winter. He reckoned that, off-season and outside of tourist and city-centre locations, it was cheaper to fly out, rent out there and eat locally, than pay rent in the UK, even in south Wales, which isn’t exactly London pricing. And he did that on an income consisting solely of benefits.
Energy Prices
CoffeePhilE According to some reports (assuming they’re right) we came VERY close to blackouts in that really hot spell a week or so back, never mind winter. I guess one difference is that fans, and especiaaly air-con, require electriciy while most heating uses gas.
The logic is inescapable and it will be worse on still, overcast winters days. So one wonders why the UKs headlong virtue signalling rush to net zero when it will make absolutely no difference to climate change. Why are we building lots of windmills and solar (often funded by the fossil fuel industry). Perhaps because it guarantees the use of fossil fuels?
Why are we fed the rubbish of grid scale storage by scientists (funded by god knows who), when the worlds largest battery will run our national grid for about 4 minutes at 3 am????
The most confusing to me as someone still keen on science….why are we not building more nuclear and less Windmills/Solar? When there is a glut of wind/solar power…those Nuclear reactors are not turned down, nuclear doesn’t work that way….the Xenon burn off problem. Those reactors keep running at the same power level around 90 to 100%, all the steam that’s generated, simply bypasses the turbines. This allows people to ooh and ahh that all our electricity needs were met by wind power. The reality is actually we have 6.5GW of power being generated by Nuclear, when you read 100% of our power came from renewables….what that really means is we have about 3,000 more wind turbines than we actually need….because those reactors cannot be “turned off, or even turned down efficiently”
Buried in page 28 are some salient facts about Iodine 235 decay into Xenon….especially the bit that effectively states as a reactors fuel gets burned up, it’s capability to burn up Xenon reduces and then significantly affects manoeuvrability.
What is left unsaid, is that reactors then have to be refuelled more often. This means less fuel burnup, much less efficiency and more downtime. The other thing that is unsaid is just how much more expensive it is to build and operate a reactor with 50% manoeuvrability (when just refuelled or new, it decreases as fuel is used up).
When these theoretical. new reactors are built in abundance, then we will only have 1500 more windmills than we need and reactors that cost 2x as much to operate.
I had a great deal of interest in Nuclear power over the last 40 years…..in fact one of my university papers was based on safety aspects of low dosage radiation for people working in the industry.
Elcarajillo It’s been a long time since I have read the regs book.
Del_UK It already is but I do not have that copy, I doubt it has changed much !!!
I was brought up on the 14th edition and worked my way through up to the 17th but did not delve much into the 18th. Done the testing and inspecting. I used to enjoy the regs but the old memory is not what it used to be.
- Edited
I think the regs can become so complicated that inexperienced sparkies can misinterpret them and cost their customers money. The unscrupulous can also misuse them, especially around diversity calculations…. induction cooker fitting jobs anyone….
Meldrew I can sympathise with the memory bit
Not sure if this has been talked about, but I was chatting to someone I know who owns 8 petrol stations, and simply because of two factors, a) they work on a GP% and b) there is no longer any competition, he is making an absolute fortune.
With there only being a small handful of gas and electric suppliers, what incentive, or stick is there to force them to lower prices. This is then added to the government collecting taxes based on % so simply the higher the price to consumers the more goes in to the coffers
On the news!! three London boroughs cannot build anymore houses for a decade / 2035
because the data centres in the area have taken up all the available power supplies and it will take a decade to upgrade the infrastructure.
Apparently data centres use more power than thousands of homes.
Hillingdon , Healing and Hounslow.
I wonder if the data centres are worried about the rising prices🤣
Elcarajillo I used to work in a data centre in the Docklands area of London, which had more backup generator capacity than the whole of the island of Malta. Just one building!
Lelit Elizabeth, Niche Zero
V60 with Drip Assist, Clever Dripper, Knock Feld47
Aeropress, Knock Aergrind
It’s quite incredible how much energy is used up by data centres, cloud storage, the internet etc. You never hear this talked about anywhere. Funny that